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David Quammen has twice received the National Magazine Award for his science essays and other work in Outside magazine. He wrote the 'Natural Acts' column in Outside from 1981 to 1995, while also doing occasional work for Harper's, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, among other magazines. His essays have been collected in two books, Natural Acts and The Flight of the Iguana. His research towards The Song of the Dodo was begun with the aid of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Quammen lives in Montana with his wife, Kris Ellingsen.
This one has a personal resonance and is my fantasy book, in fact. If I hadn't been a novelist I would have wanted to be a naturalist, an adventurer or a traveller. Quammen is all of these. His book is ostensibly a painstaking - almost 700 pages! - report on the distribution of animal and plant species on islands. This could have been a work of armchair scholarship but Quammen has the nature of a prowler and the eye of a novelist. We end up hunting dodos, marsupial tigers, dragons and a pestilential outbreak of snakes in Mauritius, Tasmania, Komodo and Guam, while Quammen reveals his Theory of Everything. I have never before been so completely captivated by a work of non-fiction. A masterpiece of natural history. Review by Jim Crace, whose books include 'Being Dead' (Kirkus UK)
